Gods or police or ???

I read an article in no 2936 NewScientist, and so I cannot link it.

It was a review on a new book: Big Gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict by Ara Norenzayan

The highlights:

"In the beginning there were many Gods."

"How, out of this pantheon, did a handful of monotheistic and polytheistic faiths come to dominate?"

" He [AN] argues that Islam, Christianity and other world religions prospered because..they alone offered all knowing, interventionist deities who judged immoral behavior, an arrangement that encouraged cooperation among large groups of strangers - because "watched people are nice people".

He asks why "atheists are so profoundly distrusted - rather than simply disliked or ignored."

His answer: "To the faithful, those who don't believe in divine monitoring cannot be expected to act morally."

But also " prejudice against atheists diminishes in nations with strong state institutions...the rule of law can be as effective as supernatural power at ensuring cooperation and accountability."

"Some of the most cohesive and peaceful societies are also the least religious." "No longer requiring their big gods to sustain large scale cooperative behavior, they have effectively outgrown them."
"This does not explain why the US, one of the most economical developed countries in the world, is still among the most religious..."


So, in the beginning were many gods, they developed into one god in many places (the polytheistic went out the the article from there) this meant more cohesive societies where large amounts of people cooperate with each other because god is looking over their shoulder and for no other reason, adn this means civilization.

Atheists are feared for that reason - that they have no god looking over their shoulder and so must behave abominably.

In countries with strong laws no gods are needed to keep people behaving morally.

But cohesive and peaceful but non-religious societies represents the next step: they have outgrown the gods, in some sort of Darwian development.

However, against that theory stands the fact that the US is one of the most religious nations in the world.

Talk about online behavior:

"This is what happens when people evade both big gods and secular eyes. If watched people are nice, the unwatched can be the nastiest of all."

I would be very interested in what you all make of this?

Interesting thesis. I would love to read the article

I found the link to the article

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...l#.UlLPgNLry2k

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Originally Posted by TheDeSade

I found the link to the article

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...l#.UlLPgNLry2k

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Well done, thanks!

I'd have to read the book to be sure, of course, but from the article I am far from convinced. The basic thesis, that religion "evolved" from many gods, to one, to none, dates back to Victorian "progressive" ideas. (The book leaves out the usually proposed previous stage, that of animism, where people believed in the spirits of places and things but saw them as equals rather than gods.) At the time it was propounded, it seemed to fit what was known of history and what was happening then, but by now there are big facts in the way of it.

The first is that the theory of gradually fewer divinities was deduced from studying "primitive" peoples, making the usual mistake of assuming they are living fossils whose culture hasn't changed in the last hundred thousand years. That was all we had at the time, but since then some physical evidence has emerged, and what it points to is the exact opposite. We have a collection of sculptures from ca. 10,000 years BP of nude female figures and abstractions which can be interpreted as such; there are no masculine equivalents. (There is a cave painting, known as "the Sorcerer," from the same period, which is usually copied as a male human figure with antlers, and which inspired Margaret Murray's theory of the ancient cult of the Horned God. But the transcription is controversial: the figure is painted, but the antlers are not, being either lightly scratched into the rock, or simply natural cracks which can be seen as horns with the eye of faith.)

We can't say for sure that these are idols: "religious item" is notoriously an archaeologist's term for "your guess is as good as mine." But unless they just prove the thesis that every new medium is first used for pornography, the best guess is that they are the first in a long line of Goddess figures that continued down to the Copper Age: and if they do represent a deity, then she was alone. Barring The Sorcerer, the earliest figurine resembling an icthyphalic Frey dates from around 6000 BP. One can make at least as good a case for the theory that the earliest religion was monotheistic, and it was only later that the clash of cultures (possibly, as has been suggested, between the sedentary cultures of the Goddess and the nomadic patriarchial tribes that worshipped the Allfather) shattered monotheism into the sparkling shards of polytheistic pantheons.

The second fact that undermines the theory is that today, in the rationalistic heartland of Western atheism, religion is growing exponentially. And it's interesting that the author doesn't appear to have noticed this at all. It's mentioned that he comes from Lebanon: it's not mentioned what faith he grew up in, but I've found before that anyone with a background in the Abrahamic faiths, whether they still believe or not, tends to have a tunnel vision of religion that simply can't see anything that doesn't have the trappings of those faiths. I've lost count of the arguments with atheists where they've said flatly "All religions (believe in Heaven and Hell, want converts, have one holy book, et cetera,)" and just got confused when I say "Mine doesn't." So the growth of Paganism, which makes nonsense of his core thesis, probably isn't even on his radar.

The third flaw that I can see is the Darwinian theory that religion survives and grows because it promotes cultural stability, hence believers survive and those around them are converted by example. In the first place, if people held to their religion because it improves their survival chances, and change it if it doesn't, the Jews of Europe would have all converted in the last thousand years. In the second place, a Lebanese should know there is no correlation between religiosity and social order. When England was under its most moralistic and conformist religion, the Puritan Commonwealth, it wasn't a time of harmony and order but of chaos and corruption. In the third place, most national conversions to Christianity didn't come about by gradual missionary work, but by a ruler's fiat (from Constantine onwards.) And the evidence is that this was usually for political reasons (including Constantine,) not from the ruler's beliefs. If there is any memetic selection going on, Christianity "evolved" not because it promoted social cohesion, but because it made rulers more secure.

My thoughts so far...

Nice stuff, leo9. You're far more versed in the history of religions than I am, that's for sure!

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today, in the rationalistic heartland of Western atheism, religion is growing exponentially.

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I'm confused by this statement. Which "heartland" are you talking about? If you mean the US, it's my understanding that the largest growing segment of religious belief are the "Nones", not atheist, though that segment is slowly growing too, but people not affiliating with any religion. Theists, perhaps, but not religious. If you're talking about Russia, I think a lot of that is rebound from the Soviet era of anti-religion. Can you clarify this?

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The third flaw that I can see is the Darwinian theory that religion survives and grows because it promotes cultural stability, hence believers survive and those around them are converted by example.

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I've always been under the impression that religions tend to grow most effectively when linked with the threat of death. "You worship as we tell you or we'll kill you" tends to send a particularly pointed message.

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most national conversions to Christianity didn't come about by gradual missionary work, but by a ruler's fiat

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or at the point of a sword.

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If there is any memetic selection going on, Christianity "evolved" not because it promoted social cohesion, but because it made rulers more secure.

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Again, I see it differently. Christianity "evolved" because people would no longer allow the Church to kill apostates and infidels, because the needs of the industrial revolution required higher levels of education in the common people, and because it quickly became apparent that the teachings of Christianity were markedly diverging from reality. The story I always liked was about the local church getting struck by lightning while the local brothel was not. Didn't take too long for the churches to accept the "revelation" that God really likes lightning rods!

But we still see the effects of religion on the ruling class. In the US in particular, with very few exceptions, it's almost impossible for an atheist to get elected to any position in government. And any politician who doesn't end a speech with "God Bless America" is almost begging to be impeached.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

Nice stuff, leo9. You're far more versed in the history of religions than I am, that's for sure!

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OK, no need for sarcasm, I read a bit, that's all. I'm sorry if it came over as pontificating.

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I'm confused by this statement. Which "heartland" are you talking about? If you mean the US, it's my understanding that the largest growing segment of religious belief are the "Nones", not atheist, though that segment is slowly growing too, but people not affiliating with any religion. Theists, perhaps, but not religious. If you're talking about Russia, I think a lot of that is rebound from the Soviet era of anti-religion. Can you clarify this?

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I was thinking of Western Europe, which is the focus of the author's dated view of atheism as the "evolutionary" end of the process of philosophical maturity. Europe, after all, was the birthplace of the Enlightenment, which began the process which the author sees as ending logically in atheism. But it is also more recently the birthplace of modern Paganism, as well as all the spiritual schools and vague tendencies which people lump together as "New Age." I do not admire or recommend these - I am among those cynics who pronounce "New Age" to rhyme with "sewage" - but the more flaky they are, the more they contradict the author's core thesis of a natural evolution away from spirituality of any kind. There is a probably optimistic estimate of a quarter of a million Pagans in the UK; I know of no figures for the Continent, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest similar levels elsewhere, and unlike the established faiths (apart from Islam, which is growing almost purely by population growth) there are more every year. All the more remarkable since no path that I know of actively seeks converts, and many still keep themselves secret and have to be sought out.

As I noted, the simplest explanation for the complete absence of this from the author's thesis is that - like the authorities with whom UK Pagans have argued over official recognition - he cannot recognise something as a religion if it doesn't have such signifiers as a Holy Book, a prophet (preferably long dead) and a priestly hierarchy.

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I've always been under the impression that religions tend to grow most effectively when linked with the threat of death. "You worship as we tell you or we'll kill you" tends to send a particularly pointed message.

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And yet, there are still Jews in Europe after a thousand years of persecution and pogroms, and there are still Christians in the most fundamentalist Islamic theocracies despite the same sort of pressures. It's not that simple.

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Again, I see it differently. Christianity "evolved" because people would no longer allow the Church to kill apostates and infidels, because the needs of the industrial revolution required higher levels of education in the common people, and because it quickly became apparent that the teachings of Christianity were markedly diverging from reality. The story I always liked was about the local church getting struck by lightning while the local brothel was not. Didn't take too long for the churches to accept the "revelation" that God really likes lightning rods!

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Not strictly relevant, but my mother told me of how their local vicarage got a television in the days when it was still highly unreliable technology, and her father enjoyed pointing out the roof with a cross on one peak and a TV aerial on the other and calling them "Faith and Hope." But I digress...

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But we still see the effects of religion on the ruling class. In the US in particular, with very few exceptions, it's almost impossible for an atheist to get elected to any position in government. And any politician who doesn't end a speech with "God Bless America" is almost begging to be impeached.

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The author rightly notes that America is a complete contradiction of his thesis, then carries on as if that makes no difference at all. Here, as in most European countries, nobody knows how many atheists there are in politics because nobody cares, but they tend to be suspicious of any politician who talks too much about their faith. One of the things that spelt the end of Tony Blair's political career was when he started to make what most people saw as an embarrassing fuss about his Christian convictions; it wasn't, people felt, the English way, he sounded almost American! Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts recently joined the growing number of organisations to have dropped God from their pledges of allegiance and other ceremonies, to no more protest than the inevitable two or three pensioners complaining that the country was going to the dogs.

So, yes, in terms of the historic faiths, religion is being rationalised away, and it is highly likely that in a few generations European Muslims too will treat the faith of their fathers as just a nostalgic tradition like the Church of England. And yet, it's exactly the people at the cutting edge of materialist rationalism, the highly educated, the IT guys and engineers and technical writers and the like, who are most likely to have a shrine to the Triple Goddess in their living room or a besom by the front door. If it is an evolutionary process, then evolution, as any biologist could have told the author, is a more complicated business than a simple trend from "primitive" to "advanced."

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As I noted, the simplest explanation for the complete absence of this from the author's thesis is that - like the authorities with whom UK Pagans have argued over official recognition - he cannot recognise something as a religion if it doesn't have such signifiers as a Holy Book, a prophet (preferably long dead) and a priestly hierarchy.

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And yet he mentions Hinduism from the start - and then just lets it go..

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So, yes, in terms of the historic faiths, religion is being rationalised away, and it is highly likely that in a few generations European Muslims too will treat the faith of their fathers as just a nostalgic tradition like the Church of England. And yet, it's exactly the people at the cutting edge of materialist rationalism, the highly educated, the IT guys and engineers and technical writers and the like, who are most likely to have a shrine to the Triple Goddess in their living room or a besom by the front door. If it is an evolutionary process, then evolution, as any biologist could have told the author, is a more complicated business than a simple trend from "primitive" to "advanced."

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That to me is one of the most important points: evolution is not something that gets better all the time - only different, according to circumstances.

But and interesting idea, nonetheless..

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Originally Posted by leo9

The author rightly notes that America is a complete contradiction of his thesis, then carries on as if that makes no difference at all.

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Having said that, he could have argued that, since his thesis is that countries become less religious as they become more rational, America fits the theory perfectly...

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Originally Posted by leo9

OK, no need for sarcasm, I read a bit, that's all. I'm sorry if it came over as pontificating.

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No sarcasm intended. I was honestly serious. I, too, read and I enjoy reading history. But my focus tends to be more on military history rather than religious history. Though sometimes there is a distressing overlap among them.

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I was thinking of Western Europe, which is the focus of the author's dated view of atheism as the "evolutionary" end of the process of philosophical maturity.

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That makes a little more sense, then. Thank you.

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but the more flaky they are, the more they contradict the author's core thesis of a natural evolution away from spirituality of any kind.

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Yeah, I'm not sure I go along with his concept of it being an evolution. It's evolution which has inflicted the ability to accept spirituality as a valid view of the world, rather than as the fantasy it really is.

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(apart from Islam, which is growing almost purely by population growth)

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Islam is the modern equivalent of the Roman Church during the dark ages: believe or die. While there has been some tolerance of other faiths in recent decades, for many years after the founding of the religion, and increasingly around the world today, there was little to no tolerance. We are again seeing non-Muslims being harassed and killed for no good reason other than the fact that they are not Muslim. And once you ARE Muslim, whether through conversion or birth, the penalty for apostasy is death. Pretty easy to keep people in the faith that way.

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he cannot recognise something as a religion if it doesn't have such signifiers as a Holy Book, a prophet (preferably long dead) and a priestly hierarchy.

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Not surprising. There don't seem to be many theists who would recognize that as a religion. Yet those same theist will claim that Atheism is a religion, despite the lack of any of them.

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And yet, it's exactly the people at the cutting edge of materialist rationalism, the highly educated, the IT guys and engineers and technical writers and the like, who are most likely to have a shrine to the Triple Goddess in their living room or a besom by the front door.

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But how much of that is fad behavior? Playing at paganism, or satanism, because it's what all the interesting people do. Kind of like making sure you serve the socially accepted brand of wine, or have the socially accepted reading material on your coffee table. When all of their friends are espousing Paganism, how many people would be willing to risk losing those friends to buck the trend?

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Originally Posted by leo9

Having said that, he could have argued that, since his thesis is that countries become less religious as they become more rational, America fits the theory perfectly...

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LOL! Having gone through the events of the last several weeks (hell, the last several YEARS) I believe you just may be right about that!